A Commentary on The Spiritual Life
Welcome. This is a much abbreviated version of the full website. It is still under construction. If you enjoy the material here, I urge you to visit the “parent” website on a tablet, desktop or laptop computer, at https://www.zoofence.com.
There you will find a completed product offering a far wider assortment of stuff, including many additional articles, letters, cartoons, artwork, forum posts, books, stories and more. As one example, The Gazebo on the full site is home to many more considerations of the spiritual, dating years back, than are included here so far.
To return to this page from any of The Zoo Fence pages, mobile or desktop, click either on a “home” link or on “The Zoo Fence” logo at the top of every page.
To return to this page from any of The Zoo Fence pages, mobile or desktop, click either on a “home” link or on “The Zoo Fence” logo at the top of every page.
Why The Zoo Fence? One night in 1974, in a fishing camp on the windward side of Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, we had a dream about publishing a journal called The Zoo Fence. The name probably originated from the practice of the Honolulu Zoo to allow artists to display their artwork on the zoo fence along Monsarrat Avenue in Waikiki. But beyond that, who knows what the subconscious meant by the phrase! In any case, it made sense in the dream, and when, more than two decades later, The Laughing Cat decided to issue a newsletter which evolved into this website, the choice of a name seemed already to have been made.
To me, to us, the universe consists of an infinite assortment of diverse stuff — me and you and my house and your car and that street and this tree and kitty litter and those planets and yesterday and yonder and my dreams and your hopes. But to a Teacher, the universe (actually, the Universe), consists of nothing more (or less) than I Here Now.
Thus, if we were to ask a Teacher, any Teacher, “Where were you before you appeared to me in this room?” she would reply Here. “And where will you be when I no longer perceive you in this room?” she would say, Here. And if we were to ask “When?” she would answer Now. To a Self-Realized Teacher, there is only one personal pronoun — I — and there is only one place and time: HERE NOW. In Zen, no-mind.
What we perceive as me and my life and the world (and here and now) is an illusion created by our mind, about which Vasistha’s Yoga suggests “Cut down this deadly poisonous tree, which looks as unshakeable as a mountain, with the sharp axe of enquiry.”
Just so, This body is me is the mind, an illusion taught and learned and believed. Erase it.
One day in Eden, Adam sees Eve for the first
time.
“I am Adam,” he says to her.
“Yes, I know,” Eve replies, “so am
I.”
In The Beginning Chapter 4
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not whine.
· A Continuing Fiction ·
The Stories of Peter K. Wensleydale
· In The Beginning ·
The Eden Conspiracy Unveiled
· Chicago Fools ·
The words we use.
A seeker’s rule of thumb:
If it can fit into your mind, it’s too small.
Okay. All of the above said, here’s the way I see it … today.
Adam-and-Eve’s banishment from Eden is, in story form, the Creation of the mind, the ego or egosense. “I am me, and you aren’t.”
The human condition: One perceived as many.
And that is where I am today, as Stefan not you. Ditto you, perceived by you as you not me. Again, many, not one.
The Eden event is just a story, a fanciful true story about the real, the Real.
As I suggest in “In The Beginning,” the Real cannot be told in words. It is too, uh, unearthly to fit into words.
Some spiritual traditions call it a dream. In effect, Adam-and-Eve aren’t banished, “they” are put to sleep. And are dreaming. Their dream is us and our lives.
Stefan and Stefan’s life is Adam-and-Eve’s dream. Stefan is a dream character. You and your life too.
But again, it is a story, a teaching device.
The “spiritual” process is a path to awakening from the dream. Mind you, awakening the dreamer, awakening Adam-and-Eve, not awakening the dream character, Stefan. Or you. You and I are characters in the dream.
Dream characters are not dreaming, so on awakening, they do not awaken. Dreamers are dreaming, so on awakening, it is they who awaken. And on awakening of the dreamer, the dream and the dream characters … POOF! Gone.
They never were and are not. But surely there is an overlap? Must be, but honestly, dunno.
Hard to believe? Even discomforting to believe? Yea, I get that. It’s complicated. Or maybe not. Consider this. Let’s say last night each of us dreamed of riding a horse across a field into a woods up to a clearing in which were a few people, men and women, some beautiful some less so, some eating a meal, who urge us to dismount, and then speak to us, observations, warnings, promises, in a foreign language we do not know but are able to undersand. A dream. (Just for fun, I used some images I know dream analysts would enjoy, but any scenario would do here.) And then we awake. And it’s gone.
All gone. But while in train, it’s unmistakably there. In my experience, I have never dreamed that I was dreaming, that the persons, things, events were not “real”. I have never even considered the real-ness of a dream while dreaming it. While dreaming, the dream is real. Even all there is.
It is my belief, my sense of what is, that what you and I each call “me and my life,” is like that. In some mysterious way, me and my life, you and your life, is both real and unreal, simultaneously. Actually occurring, but somehow not really.
I am certain of that, sufficiently certain to say (cautiously) “I know it.”
There is more to it, of course. But this is a piece of it.
What I do not know is, who is the dreamer? Who — or is it what? — is having the dream, doing the dreaming?
And I do not know why it is happening. What’s the purpose? Is there a purpose? In “In The Beginning”I suggest that it might be God’s way to experience being stuff, separate and individual things, an experience denied to an infinite being that is by definition all there is all at once. God, who knows creation, discovering what it’s like to be created. Or is it evolution? Charles Darwin messing with our lives? Or none of the above. Or all of the above. Dunno.
And who or what precisely will I be when the dreamer awakens? If not Stefan, who? what? where? Dunno, dunno, dunno.
But what I do know is what I have been told and what I have read by the Teachers, and I am convinced it is the Truth. Well, actually, Stefan, a dream character, knows what he has read and been told in the dream, and I am, Stefan is, convinced that it is True.
And yet, it is convincing because I have experienced, I continue to experience, moments, series of moments, Seeing It, Being It, precisely as the Teachers describe It. They last just moments, sometimes minutes, sometimes a few minutes. Not long. And yet, the Truth of those moments is evident and believable, persuasively True. They are beyond the dream. It is not that they just seem to be beyond; they are unmistakably so. I cannot explain it in words except to say it is, they are, a happening above and beyond in every sense of the words. Like a movie in black-and-white that becomes suddently, inexplicably in full technicolor. A veil removed. A shaded window abruptly opened to full sunlight. Not that, but like that. And, yes, just a moment. But these moments are a clear, certain, convincing piercing of the dream by the Real.
A self-generated, uninterrupted, causeless, purposeless, boundaryless, joy-filled, silent “Oh my.” Like that.
Blissful.
Is that what life, Life, Real Life, is, beyond the dream? Dunno.
But I suspect so.
Finally, a confession. I am sometimes asked about my spiritual practice. I keep the spiritual, my being a seeker, in mind as constantly and consistently as I am able, from awakening in the morning to sleep at night. “Fix your mind on Me” (Krishna). I call it constant meditation. It is my life, not a part of my life. I consider the entirety of my life, life itself, to be a whole. I look for it in every event, every thing, and every one I encounter, in whatever shape or form or manner. “I perform the worship of the Self who is undivided though appaently divided with the flowers of whataver comes to me naturally and whatever actions are natural to me” (Vasistha’s Yoga). There is no thou shalt or thou shalt not. If God is Infinite, then God is All There Is, and All There Is is God. It is all one, the One. “I never see a thing without seeing God before it” (Abu Bakr, companion of Muhammad). Life — Nancy’s and my life — has become simple. Nothing special. Old stuff and useless habits allowed to drift away. “No thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:34). I take refuge in the enlightening words of Jalaluddin Rumi: “I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”
And this: To those new to the spiritual process and so to whom some stuff here seems a little weird, consider this: In the Christian tradition it is taught that the Teacher Jesus/Issa insisted to his disciples (and by extension humanity) “This I command you: Love one another.” All the traditions I have come across demand the same. I take it to mean whoever and whatever we encounter in life, we are to address her, him, it wisely, maturely, sensibly, and with love. Surely when those words were first spoken to Peter and Mary Magdalene and the others, one of them must have whined (if they dared!), “Are you nuts? Have you read the lead story in today‘s newspaper? Rape, child molestation, spouse beating! And that’s just the first paragraph.” To that, I suspect he reminded them, as do all the Teachers, no one said walking the spiritual path would be easy.
This too: Just for fun, suppose God takes a nap (yes, of course, it’s ridiculous), and dreams of being born a person, multiple persons, in a world composed of persons and places and things and stuff. And in this dream, each person has a life lived among all the other persons. And each of these individual lives is separate from all the other individual lives, but all of them, being elements of the same dream, are intimately related. Each of the dreamed individuals has a name. Among those names are Stefan and your name. And in this cosmic dream there is a sequence in which those two named dream characters meet, not physically but notionally — writing and reading and considering these very words — and they wonder who am I, where am I, what am I. And that wondering contributes to a developing escape path out of the dream into Awakened Reality. Observing that phenomenon as it unfolds, sensing its happening within Himself, within Herself, God remarks, “How cool is that!” And, embracing that thought, together as one you and I experience a wonderful thing, dubbed in Latin miraculum.
DISCLAIMER: Before you proceed any further, please consider the following. We have no credentials that you too do not have. We are simply spiritual seekers writing here on the basis of our own personal experience. In effect, then, what you find on The Zoo Fence is an expression of personal opinion based upon personal observation of our own lives. Please read it as such. If any of it is of any use to you, we are delighted. But please do not mistake it for authoritative guidance or advice on any subject. We neither wish to nor are we qualified to, issue anything like that. In a word, as regards everything on The Zoo Fence, your best guide is your own common sense.
Intense,
abiding, and spontaneous
Yearning for God
is a self-sufficient practice,
and the simplest path.
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The Zoo Fence
A Commentary on The Spiritual Life
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